Nintendo To Release 5 Smartphone Games By March 2017

During a financial results briefing, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata touched briefly upon the company’s partnership with smartphone game maker DeNA. As previously reported, Nintendo and DeNA will collaborate to produce .titles based on Nintendo I.P. for smartphones.

“Regarding the number of the titles, you may want to know that we will release approximately five titles by the end of the next fiscal year, which is the end of March 2017,” Iwata said to investors and analysts.

He continued, “You may think it is a small number, but when we aim to make each title a hit, and because we want to thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases, this is not a small number at all and should demonstrate our serious commitment to the smart device business.”

“We will strive to expand this business into global markets at a steady pace so that eventually we will entertain hundreds of millions of people all around the world. We are aiming to make this one of the pillars of Nintendo’s revenue structure.”

Smartphones games aren’t the only thing DeNA and Nintendo are collaborating on, though. DeNA is also building Nintendo’s new customer loyalty program, which will make use of a single Nintendo ID that can be used on PCs, smart devices, and Nintendo devices to access “various services including the ones based on their past purchases and gameplay records as well as services that will be an improved version of the current loyalty program”.

Iwata also stressed that the company’s dedication to dedicated games devices has not waned, and that Nintendo hope to use smartphones to increase the exposure of their I.P. and draw new audiences to dedicated game devices.